After four years, it seems high time to update you
on the continued success of the Shibolet Kindergarten project in
Beer-Sheva, Israel. This should be of interest to all of you since
the Society for Prevention of Violence (SPV) has technical
responsibility for guiding this Social Skills project, which has just
finished its seventh successful school year. As was reported in the
1996 Spring Newsletter, the Social Skills lessons using a translation
of the SPV Social Skills curriculum into Hebrew, are an essential
part of the teaching activities each year in the Shibolet
Kindergarten for children at the ages from PreKindergarten through
grade 3. The children of Pre- and Kindergarten age attend the
Shibolet Kindergarten every day and receive frequent intermittent
Social Skills lessons during the entire day, while the children in
grades 1 through 3 attend Social Skills lessons only for two hours at
a time during a few times a week.
The changes in behavior of the children after they learn and apply
social skills are evaluated by analyzing their answers to test
questions. The test questionnaire, see
Figure 1, is completed before the start of
the first Social Skills lesson in the year, and again after the last
Social Skills lesson of the same school year. This test has been
developed by the SPV and has been used for many years in schools in
the United States which employ the SPV curricula to evaluate how
effectively the practice of social skills during one school year can
improve attitudes and behaviors of children. Figures
2, 3, and 4, show the results of the
evaluations for the different age groups. These data were obtained in
the Shibolet Kindergarten during the school year 1998-99. An analysis
of the results, (see
the accompanying Test Evaluation
Analysis), shows the effectiveness of
Social Skills Training as summarized in the words of the Beer-Sheva
teaching staff.
Already in 1995, I suggested to the people in Beer-Sheva to start
workshops to teach social skills to parents, teachers and others, who
are interested in violence prevention. Workshops in Beer-Sheva have
now become a reality, not only to teach parents and other adults
separately from children, but also to teach social skills to parents
together with their own and other children. These workshops seem to
be very successful as indicated in two
letters.
These letters were written at the end of the last school year,
1999-2000, by a parent and a grandmother who attended the workshops
together with their children. The letters were translated from Hebrew
into English by the people in Beer-Sheva. Incidentally, Fanny, the
person to whom one of the letters is directed, is the main teacher in
the Shibolet Kindergarten. She understands well how to teach social
skills, and I hope she keeps teaching at the Shibolet Kindergarten
since she is a first-class teacher and thus her presence is very
important to the project.
The intent is to continue and extend the Shibolet Kindergarten
project to other locations in Beer-Sheva and Israel and to organize
an increased number of Social Skills workshops, for instance, in
those afternoon clubs which, as I believe, have been established in
Beer-Sheva to stem domestic violence. These workshops, as I
understand, are also attended by clients of other anti-violence
organizations with the mission to curb and prevent fights and
violence in schools, on streets and in everyday life.